One of the great leveling factors of cloud technology is the ability for small companies and individuals to do things that, not that long ago, would have required the support of a larger IT organization’s infrastructure, and doing them quickly and affordably. One of the most powerful yet simple of these technologies is ad hoc querying of data offered by Amazon Athena.

May is National Bike Month!  This week is National Bike to Work Week which is capped off on Friday (today) with National Bike to Work Day.  According to the League of American Bicyclists, National Bike Month was established in 1956 as a chance to showcase the many benefits of bicycling - and encourage more folks to giving biking a try.

It’s that time of year again. We’re prepping for the fourth summer of the ISE Coding Garage!  Soon I will be heading out to high schools in Iowa City to recruit at the AP Computer Science classes. This year's Coding Garage sessions will kick off on Wednesday, June 6th.

Author’s note: If you do a bit of internet searching you will see both permissioned and permissionless distributed ledgers referred to as blockchains.  Some will disagree and call this a travesty, others will not.  The author claims to have no idea which side is right.  For the purpose of this and related blog posts blockchains may be used to referred to as either permissioned or permissionless.

In our previous post the definition of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) was introduced.  In this post we will go further in understanding the various types of DLT systems that can exist.  Recall from our previous post three key factors in defining the taxonomy of DLT; how to distribute the ledger, if the ledger is public or private, and who is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the ledger (permissioned/permissionless).  The figure below provides a graphical reference for keeping those three characteristics in mind.